BWe Special Issue: Issue 16.1 2020 Defending Basic Writing and Developmental Education:
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Editors’ Introduction Darin Jensen and Emily Suh html|pdf Meet My English 93 Class Patrick Sullivan html|pdf Statistics and numerical completion rates have come to dominate how we think about higher education in America today. This focus on bottom line metrics and “return on investment” is drawn from neoliberal economic theory, which suggests that a free market business model can find solutions to most human problems, if it can only be left alone to do what it does best. When applied to non-business-related endeavors like education and especially basic writing programs, however, this numbers-driven approach hides from view a crucial variety of complex contextual factors that play pivotal roles in the lives of many basic writing students. These include powerful social, cultural, and economic forces well beyond the control of any single individual. This essay seeks to resist and subvert this neoliberal formulation, now widespread across America, and replace it with a more local, individualized, student-centered understanding of success for basic writers. This essay seeks to enact this important work through the use of student-authored vignettes—basic writing students speaking for themselves to us about their lives, challenges, goals, and aspirations. Getting Thorny: Elizabeth McPherson and the Activist Tradition of Two-Year College English Christie Toth html|pdf This essay contributes to the emerging conversation about two-year college teacher-scholar-activism by revisiting the work of Elisabeth McPherson, the first community college faculty member to chair CCCC. Arguing that McPherson's fade from disciplinary memory reflects the marginalization of two-year college faculty that coincided with the rise of neoliberalism, Christie Toth traces three key themes in McPherson's published work: advocating for two-year colleges and the professionalization of their faculty; subverting institutional labeling of two-year college students; and challenging racism, classism, and sexism through pedagogy and policy. While her published work is not beyond critique, McPherson's career offers historical precedent for a two-year college English professional identity that integrates critical teaching, scholarly and organizational engagement, and activism for social justice at multiple scales. Viva La Revolucion-ish: The Teacher-Scholar-Activist as Guerilla Cheri Lemieux-Spiegel html|pdf This essay examines the complexities involved in taking up and sustaining one’s work as a teacher-scholar-activist working within literacy education today. Spiegel argues that the guerrilla moniker may be a productive metaphor through which faculty can see and resee their positioning and approach to their work. Focusing upon guerrilla cause, band, and tactics, she provides guided heuristics to help faculty shape their response to local context as exigencies compete, resources drain, and terrain shifts. Reform as Access, Reform as Exclusion: Making Space for Critical Approaches to the Neoliberal Moment Kirsten Higgins and Anthony Warnke html|pdf This essay offers a critical framework for engaging with Basic Writing at the two-year college. By intersecting access-oriented initiatives within the progressive tradition of basic writing scholarship with neoliberal, corporate-sponsored initiatives, the article stakes out a pragmatic space for values-driven change to calcified developmental education structures. Adam Hubrig and Derrick Goss html|pdf This essay presents a semester long partnership between two courses at different institutions--one in a local high school, the other at a four-year public university--as a community form of community engaged pedagogy with the potential to subvert Neoliberal assumptions about our students and their writing. Our project inspects the notions of literacy that our students have internalized about themselves and others, interrogates the "value" neoliberalism ascribes to different forms of literacy, and seeks out ways to center our students' literacies that foreground the power these often institutionally dismissed literacies can have. Erica M. Stone and Sarah E. Austin html|pdf An online course designer and adjunct instructor use autoethnography and case study methodologies to examine how neoliberalism has rendered the postsecondary online writing classroom transactional. Using a public, open-enrollment, two-year institution, we explore the ways online writing courses are impacted by institutional structures that mechanize programmatic standards, student expectations, and faculty behaviors. Marcy Isabella and Heather McGovern html|pdf To help faculty resist neoliberalism, the authors outline ways to determine how to resist: looking behind, around, and through. The authors introduce administrative amnesia, show how colleagues applied looking to respond rhetorically to local issues (e.g., shared governance, sexual assault, and repercussions of university expansion on basic writing), and offer advice on being resilient. Classroom Narrative Theory in Practice: Halloween Write-In html|pdf This essay offers an archive of our collaboration as teachers of Basic Writing and former students of Basic Writing on the October 31, 2017 Halloween Write-In for students of Basic Writing. Archives are meant to solidify knowledge by acting as the institutionally approved and organized evidence of some sort of truth. What we seek instead is a challenge to this traditional meaning of archives by clarifying our work as a space to seek refuge, rest, succor, security, and possibilities for utopia. In times of scarcity, we have found building and creating connection across communities to be our greatest challenge and our most abiding strength. Book Review: Economic Inequality, Neoliberalism, and the American Community College James Dyer html|pdf |
